


(what makes you think I could start) clean slated

by elizaleigh



Series: all shades of blue [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Family, Friendship, Gen, Healing, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 03:03:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19880548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizaleigh/pseuds/elizaleigh
Summary: At first, El likes school. Then she has a biology lab and everything changes.Or, how a new school and old demons lead Will to learning the truth about El's past. (Post-S3)





	(what makes you think I could start) clean slated

“Can Mike come for the Snowball?”

Joyce turns to her daughter, seated behind Will in the passenger’s seat. “What?”

“School. It has a Snowball?” El asks.

“Oh, sweetie, this school might not have a Snowball, necessarily,” Joyce replies, slowly. In the rearview mirror she can see El’s eyes cast downward. “But it’ll be good, you’ll see. There’ll be other dances, and pep rallies, and sports events. And you’re going to learn so much. Right, Will?” She nudges her son, who is crumpling the corner of his and El’s enrollment forms. He shrugs noncommittally. “How about after we finish up your enrollment, we grab lunch and go over your schedules? That way you’ll know where you can find each other.” El looks to Will, who nods once, and then nods her head as well.

***

“Twins?” asks the teacher. Joyce flushes in response. “I could hardly handle one at a time, let alone two!” El turns to Will at her left, but he’s turned to his mother.

“And my son, Jonathan,” Joyce reminds the teacher. “He should have been by yesterday? He’ll be a senior.”

“Yes, yes,” the teacher says. “Well, I’m Mrs. Bennett – ” El tosses the word in her mouth, practicing before she’ll have to speak – “And I teach Biology – and I can tell you that all of us at Springfield High are very excited to have you here…” Mrs. Bennett looks at El as though she’s expecting something.

“Will and Jane,” Joyce interrupts. Flustered, she adds, “We’re all a bit tired from moving, sorry.”

“Will and Jane,” Mrs. Bennett repeats. “I’ll get your schedules printed out and then we’ll see you on Monday.”

***

Will and Jane Byers share English, History, and Algebra. Will is also enrolled in Studio Art, French III and Honors Biology, while Jane has a spot in Introductory French and Normal Biology. El learns this by swiping the already-wrinkled paper from Will’s hand as he dips a French fry into his milkshake, dropping melted ice cream onto a now-clear tabletop. “Halfway happy,” El mutters as she continues to stare at their schedules.

***

Springfield High is more colorful than Hawkins Middle. The walls are blue, not white, and grey-spotted carpeting lines most classrooms. The halls still feature vinyl floors, but there are enough footsteps along them when El enters the building that she feels more of an orchestra around her rather than the echoing footsteps of the lab.

She likes school, for the most part. She likes the stories of History and the simplicity of Algebra. She especially likes when Will agrees to read their English books aloud, on nights when they both are feeling a little alone.

“It’s a depressing book,” Will comments one night as he sets _The Great Gatsby_ on their shared nightside table. “Saying you can never go back. That everything in the past is just…gone.”

“You want to go back?” El asks slowly.

Will sighs. “I mean, to before everything. Before the Upside Down. Don’t you?”

“No,” El exclaims. Will realizes his mistake and tries to speak, but El reaches for the nearby lamp in response.

They’re not close – not yet, and definitely not as twins should be. And yet, they are two sides of the same coin, their Befores and their Afters, and El lies awake wondering at how the Upside Down had become the home they’d both shared in a prior life.

To their classmates, they are similar enough. Both dark-haired and hard-working and quiet. They pass as twins to those who will never know about the Demogorgon and the Mind Flayer and that only one of them is a Byers.

***

It’s nearly a month into school when El’s Biology class has their first Lab assignment. Mrs. Bennett leads the twenty-person mob from their cramped classroom down the hall and –

_Oh no._

This is wrong, El thinks. This is all wrong.

The walls are white-tiled and smell faintly of lemons, with flickering white light pouring from the ceiling in lieu of windows. Mrs. Bennett’s clogs clop against the vinyl floor and for a moment her gray bob transforms into a different head of hair from a different time.

“Today we’ll be tracking the decomposition of an egg’s membrane…” Mrs. Bennett begins, approaching a line of red-tin soda cans.

This is all wrong.

Mrs. Bennett talks about the scientific process and notation and trial and error and El’s stomach begins to turn. Her eyes dart around the room as though Will might appear, guide her, talk her out of this hole, but she knows he won’t. Under the sterile air El can feel her hair – her hair, curly and thick and whole – contract up into her head, can feel herself shrink and her clothes evaporate, giving way to a white-patterned gown, and even though the door is right there El knows that she can’t leave, she can’t leave, she can’t leave –

Next thing she knows, she’s running.

It’s been two years since she left the lab but it feels the same: November leaves crunching beneath her feet, wintery air hitting exposed arms, the knowledge that time will catch her and when it does, this interlude of normalcy will end and El will be Eleven once more.

***

“What do you mean, she’s gone?” Joyce demands. “She just left?!” A voice over the phone confirms this and informs Joyce that if she does not return and apologize to her teacher, Jane Byers will be suspended for the rest of the week. Joyce manages to nod along until she can slam the phone down. Then she flags over her manager. “E – my daughter,” Joyce corrects, “I need to pick her up.” She doesn’t wait for permission.

***

Will Byers is in Studio Art when Jane Byers is in Normal Biology. When Will and El do talk, Will talks about this class, about the drawing he’s doing of the woods behind the schoolhouse. “Better than drawing bad things,” he’d said one particularly good night, when he’d handed a few pencils and paper across the room for El to doodle along with him.

Not for the first time, it occurs to El that her powers would be helpful right now. The stretch of school fields that border the forest is long, and El’s legs feel as though they might give way; but something about her powers scares her in this moment, making her stomach drop as though she’d opened a gate right there inside of it. Falling leaves blur in her vision and El almost misses Will’s brown bowl cut among them, humming quietly as he leans into a canvas on his lap.

She doesn’t yell, she doesn’t talk. Will looks up and opens his mouth, but El is there before he can question her, grabbing at his sleeve, his head, his face. “Real,” she exclaims, “Real, real, real!” Then she kneels down to cry on his shoulder.

***

Will nearly has to carry her to the payphone. “You can call Mom,” he says. No questions, no demands, just two quarters in El’s pocket and the assurance that Will is nearby. She appreciates his distance, though she’s loathe to let go of his flannel.

She should call Joyce, she knows, but it’s nearly 3-1-5, and before she can stop them, El’s hands are flying to the only other number she has memorized.

“Wheeler residence, Karen speaking.” El imagines Karen wrangling Holly as she speaks.

“Mike,” is all El can get out.

“I’m sorry, Mike’s not here right now. I can have him call you back later, if you leave a number?”

El hangs up.

***

“You want to tell me what you were thinking when you, what, booked it out of that class?” Joyce demands. El slips further down her seat so that her seatbelt cuts into her chin.

“Booked?”

“Ran out,” Joyce replies on instinct. Then, “What happened?!”

El doesn’t respond. When they arrive home, she scurries to her and Will’s bedroom and shuts the door. In the hall, she can hear Will explaining, “She kept saying ‘real, real, real…’”

She can’t bring herself to change or move or even cry, so she lies on the floor next to her bed, running pictures through her mind – Mike, Hop, Max, Lucas, Dustin, Will, people to remind her what is real. She pulls her SuperComm from under her bed and, even though she knows it won’t reach, she turns it on. “Mike,” she says, softly, “Mike, today was bad.”

She doesn’t eat dinner. First Will, then Jonathan, then Joyce try to pry her from the ground, but she stares at them as though she might still be able to expel them from the room with just a sideways glance. After dinner, Joyce sits down next to her.

“I heard you left during Bio.” El doesn’t respond. Joyce smooths a hand over El’s curls and gently coaxes El’s head into her lap. “I know when I was in high school, we had labs in bio.” El flinches. “Was that… Did it remind you?”

“Mike,” El says in response.

“I just called Karen, to see if he could talk,” Joyce replies, unfazed. “He’s not home right now.” She pauses. “But Mike isn’t the only one you can talk to. Me, Jonathan, Will – we’re your family. We’re always here to talk to you.” But El doesn’t talk.

***

Will doesn’t return to their room until past midnight, evidently hoping that El would be asleep by the time he snuck in. Instead he finds her clutching her SuperComm and pinching her skin.

“It won’t work this far away,” Will says.

El glares. Will plops onto his bed, leaning his head back and squeezing his eyes before bouncing up and adding, “Mike’s not the only person in the world who cares about you, you know.”

“You don’t care,” El replies coolly.

“I do!”

“You were upset,” El points out. “When I joined the Party.”

“That’s not – that – ” Will sputters. “We’re family.”

“Not real.”

“Of course, it’s real!”

“Not _real_!”

“Do you know how much it took – ”

“ _I’m scared_ it’s not real!”

Will stops. “What do you mean?”

El looks down. “You. Mike. Joyce.” She gulps. “Hop.” Her eyes begin to well but Will is frozen in place, looking on as though being forced. “The lab was experiments,” she says slowly. “I didn’t see outside. I didn’t see people or sky. Then I leave and the experiments are gone.” Will leans in. “But if there are experiments here…”

“Maybe this is all an experiment,” Will finishes. El looks up in surprise. “Hey, Mike’s not the only one who can listen.” Finally, Will feels his muscles loosen, his nerve slow; he pushes himself off the bed and across the room to sit next to El and grab her hand. She squeezes it in return, veins bulging under the black-inked 011.

El still struggles to string words together, but Will is patient. He doesn’t recoil when El talks about the Coke can or the cat. He doesn’t run when she admits to killing the guards. He flinches alongside her as she traces the lines of the wires that used to wrap around her head and he shivers with anger when she talks about punishment. He doesn’t correct her when Brenner slips back into Papa.

“I feel like that sometimes, too,” Will admits. “I mean, I was only in the Upside Down for a week – I can’t even imagine…” He trails off. “But sometimes I see like, a dark cloud, or a shadow in the woods, and I wonder if I’m deluding myself thinking it can ever go away.”

El doesn’t respond right away. Instead, she reaches for her copy of _The Great Gatsby_ and hands it to Will. “Read?”

***

El stays home for the rest of the week. Will delivers a messily-written apology letter to Mrs. Bennett, who accepts it warily, and the Byers move on. There is some twittering when El walks into Normal Biology the next Monday, flanked by Will for moral support, but Mrs. Bennett settles the class quickly. El draws in her notebook for most of the class, and at the end, Mrs. Bennett asks her to stay after.

“Jane,” she says, “I heard about your father… and the fire.” Mrs. Bennett pauses. “I should have thought about the Bunsen burners beforehand.” El doesn’t know what a Bunsen burner is, but she nods nonetheless. “I hope we can move on to have a successful schoolyear.”

El thanks her and leaves the classroom. Will is waiting outside.

***

Springfield High doesn’t have a Snowball, but it does have a Thanksgiving Throw-Down. During one of their daily phone calls, El mentions it to Mike, and after a lot of pleading it’s agreed that Mike can come for the weekend to attend.

He arrives on the Friday afternoon, slouched under an overstuffed backpack, and when Mike runs to El, Will doesn’t frown.

Mike sleeps on the floor of their room that night, equally spaced between El and Will, and Mike is surprised he can hardly get a word in.

“I thought you two were the quiet ones?” he comments.

El chuckles, thinking of something she’d heard Jonathan say to Nancy on the phone. “Shared trauma,” she says. Will cracks a smile.

**Author's Note:**

> I have so many feelings about ST3, especially about the parallels between El and Will. It occurred to me that Will probably doesn't know the extent of the abuse El faced in the lab, and 2,000 words later, here we are. The title comes from "Least Complicated" by the Indigo Girls - definitely worth a listen!
> 
> (Also, thanks for bearing with my "Great Gatsby" references - the English major in me couldn't resist.)


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